Buddhist Way Or The Other Way; A Moment Of Reckoning For All Buddhists

By Vishwamithra1984 –August 31, 2016

“You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger”. ~Buddha

“Building Buddhist temples, placing statues under Bo-trees have negated reconciliation efforts”. Making a very potentially-unpopular observation, Rajitha Senaratne, Minister of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine, however, could not have uttered truer words. Hailing from a Buddhist background, educated in the two leading Buddhist schools in Sri Lanka, firstly at Nalanda Vidyalaya and then Ananda College, Rajitha’s utterances could be politically incorrect, but they are indeed bold and beautiful. Erecting Buddha statues at any junction, preserving Bo-trees at every corner of our widely spread-out hamlets has become an infectious habit of Sinhalese Buddhist people to show the world a misplaced sense of devotion to the religion. Behind some of these ‘religion-related’ constructions are invariably found the most destructive elements in our society- drug dealers and traffickers, illicit liquor manufacturers, local hooligans and petty merchants of flesh and lust.They all expect forgiveness and repentance by extending these superficial offerings to a mind-created Buddha so that they could go to sleep with a self-deceived peaceful mind. These superficial offerings are in fact bribes offered to an image for clemency. Decline of Buddhism from one of Prathipatthi Pooja(Practice) to Aameesa Pooja (Ritualistic) has been very much in evidence in the last few decades.

To quote an unknown writer who seems to have understood the fundamental core of Buddhism writes thus: “I know that we can make great Karma by offering Flowers,candles,incense,food,robes and other things for the Buddha statue thinking as if the Buddha is alive. But whenever I do offer these things my mind says ‘The Buddha is not there to receive this. And this is not the proper way to pay respect for the Buddha. The proper way is to try to be mindful and try to be free from the defilement in the mind.’ Am I cultivating bad thoughts by thinking this way? What is the proper way to think when we offer these things to the Buddha statue?” As embroiled in inscrutable spiritual teachings and relating each and every miniscule phenomenon to a section or subsection of the Sutras in the scriptures, some of our Buddhist monks have willy nilly deflected from what is real and present. This, they do either by willful deception (or self-deception) or due to ignorance or misreading of the Sutras.

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